This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
白
In brief: the manifestation of the Dao and Fa in this world
Common reading
Pictographic. The oracle-bone form depicts sunlight shining up and down; the brightness of the sun is white; characters with 白 mostly relate to light and whiteness. Original sense: the colour white. Shuowen: “白 is the colour of the west. The Yin dynasty used white in its affairs.” Zhuangzi, “In the World of Men”: “The empty room produces whiteness.”
Design reading
日 with a left-falling stroke on top. The left-falling stroke shows a quality that the sun (日) reveals: whiteness. 日 is a horizontal inside 口, which also stands for the Dao and the Fa in our world. So white is the manifestation of the Dao and the Fa in our world. Black and white are yin and yang to each other: white is yang, and black is yin.
Related characters
About this entry
This entry is taken from the edited manuscript of LI Xutong’s Exploring the Design Mysteries of Chinese Characters. The common reading follows traditional philology, the Shuowen Jiezi and other classics, and modern dictionaries; the design reading recovers the rationale of the character’s formation from the meanings of its strokes, the pairing of yin and yang, and the nine-palace layout, following the New Six Scripts. The premise of the design reading, that the generative mechanism of Chinese characters was designed, is an axiom of this system and differs from the evolutionary account usual in philology; the two readings are kept apart, as surface and depth.